Yahoo! is taking the lead role in enabling the global mobile ecosystem to bring compelling mobile Internet experiences to consumers. Yahoo! delivers its services throughout the world from its own network as well as through partnerships with mobile operators and device manufacturers around the world. Yahoo! recently opened up the company’s mobile platform to allow the world’s developers and publishers to mobilize their own offerings.
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Facebook is one of the most popular Internet sites today. A key feature that arguably contributed to Facebook’s unprecedented success is its application platform, which enables the development of third-party social-networking applications. Understanding how these applications are installed and used is important for the function and utility of web-based online social networks, e.g. to better engineer them and/or to design advertising campaigns.
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The rapid advent of “Web 2.0” applications has unleashed new HTTP traffic patterns which differ from the conventional HTTP request-response model. In particular, asynchronous pre-fetching of data in order to provide a smooth web browsing experience and richer HTTP payloads (e.g., Javascript libraries) of Web 2.0 applications induce larger, heavier, and more bursty traffic on the underlying networks. We present a traffic study of Web 2.0 applications including Google Maps, modern Web-email, and social networking Web sites, and compare them with all HTTP traffic. We highlight the key differences of Web 2.0 traffic from traditional HTTP traffic through statistical analysis. As such our work elucidates the changing face of one of the most popular application on the Internet: The World Wide Web.
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In the past, most Web content was static and predictable. But today’s reality is that Web content—even from so-called “trusted” sites—is constantly changing with end-users encouraged to post, edit, or manipulate content. The most popular and heavily-trafficked sites that make the most use of dynamic Web 2.0 content, are also the most vulnerable to attack. In fact, according to Websense® research covering the first half of 2008, over sixty percent of these top 100 sites either hosted malicious content or contained a masked redirect to an illegitimate site.
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Web 2.0 refers to a trend in web design and technology that facilitates the publishing and sharing of information among internet users. The term was first used by technology commentator Tim O’Reilly in 2004 to describe a new direction in web use, distinguished by increased interactivity between users. Web 2.0 encourages the development of a participatory culture, where users contribute content back to the web rather than merely consuming it. Traditionally, websites consisted of static pages for commerce and the one-way delivery of information. Now applications such as blogs and social networks enable users to contribute and share information in ways that did not even exist a few years ago. Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia, MySpace and Facebook are now household names, with over half of our surveyed respondents acknowledging the use of these tools in their personal and professional lives.
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The mercurial rise of social networking sites and user-generated content has rekindled users’ interest in accessing Web-based services on the move. That the mobile phone is an inherently personal device which is not only with us most of the time, but also contains a huge amount of personal data (contact lists of names and phone numbers, stored messages and emails etc.) makes it a logical extension for the social network and the host of other collaborative Web 2.0 applications gaining traction.
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The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise greatly increases the value of your company?s most important asset: employees? knowledge, relationships and initiative. Increased collaboration accelerates productivity. Making knowledge more visible increases innovation and shortens turnaround times. Your company transforms into a more socially connected organization that reacts faster and more effectively to the market.
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Nearly all Web 2.0 applications started life as consumer-focused services, only later finding their way into the enterprise. But unlike many consumer ‘toys’, Web 2.0 actually delivers impressive benefits to the enterprise, including:
Streamlining collaboration within and beyond the enterprise
Accelerating search and information retrieval
Capturing knowledge assets and facilitating knowledge transfer
Speeding application development and deployment
Communicating with stakeholders in new ways
Some of these benefits are ‘soft’. Others are quantifiable. But all have combined to earn the attention of line-of-business managers and IT strategists alike. Web 2.0 is here to stay.
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